UPDATE 27th August 2018: It has kindly been brought to my attention the warranty for SunPower’s P17 panels excludes normal residential installation. The SunPower P17 warranty says it does not apply to:

“PV Modules which have been installed on single-family homes or semi‐detached homes, including but not limited to duplexes and townhomes. For clarity, apartment and condominiums are not excluded.”

UPDATE 31st August 2018: P18 and P19 panels will be covered by SunPower’s warranty when installed on residential homes. Warranties for P-series panels can be downloaded from SunPower’s Australian site on this page.

SunPower Performance Series solar panel, or P-Series for short, are now available in Australia. These attractive panels aren’t available in a wide range of colours and are a lower efficiency but cheaper alternative to SunPower’s E-Series and X-Series panels. While sold overseas for more than a year, they’ve only been available Down Under for a few months and they’ve been on the down low, as their arrival was devoid of fanfare. [Read more…]

Do you know the difference between a P-Type and N-Type solar cell, duuuuuude?

When it comes to material for making solar cells, silicon is the most bodacious of all the elements. Its market share is an excellent circa 97%1. If you want solar PV, there is next to no choice other than silicon. However, there is more than one type of silicon cell, which is fortunate for people who enjoy faffing about when deciding what to buy. [Read more…]

Phono Solar have only gone and drilled holes in their new solar panels…

If you want a solar cell to produce electricity then it’s important to let the sunshine in. Specifically, into the solar cell. Not letting the sunshine in is a bad idea. Despite how very important this is, most solar cell manufacturers place a fine metal wire grid on top of their cells that blocks around 5% to 6% of sunlight falling on them, for no other reason than they don’t work without it. It appears the metal grid is necessary to make electrical contacts required for current to flow. [Read more…]

Trina have set a record 19.86% aperture efficiency for polycrystalline.

Trina Solar announced a new world record for solar panel efficiency on Tuesday. The announcement was made via a press release that was mostly comprised of words.

But that wasn’t all it contained. Oh no, this press release was far too important to get by just using them. It also contained numbers, punctuation, and percentage signs.

Exactly what the particular arrangement of all these ingredients they poured into their press release actually means is a little tricky to work out. But, for your elucidation, I shall now attempt reading comprehension and I am not even going to use a net. [Read more…]

One of Juno’s 3 solar panels. This section will produce about 5kW in earth orbit, and 185W in Jupiter Orbit. Image: NASA/JPL

Juno, the first solar powered space probe to be sent to Jupiter, entered orbit around the gas giant planet yesterday. Its mission is to probe Jupiter in ways it has never been probed before to discover clues about its formation, internal structure, water content, and weather. Part of its mission is the investigate the Great Red Spot. However, because it is currently only around half the size it was 100 years ago, it is now really just an Okay Red Spot. [Read more…]

I have previously mentioned SunPower makes excellent solar panels. This definitely includes their uncanny X-Series, which are a high efficiency, high reliability, line of monocrystalline panels. In January they broke the record for most efficient solar panel with a figure of 22.8%. And now, less than six months later, they have increased that by an impressive 1.3 percentage points to 24.1%.

I can only marvel at the improvements in PV efficiency that have occurred so far in 2016. Just six months ago I would have said the chance of any panel exceeding 24% efficiency this year would have been a long shot, but lately improving efficiency has been smashingrecords like an unstoppable juggernaut. [Read more…]

Hanwha Q Cells has smashed the record for polysilicon solar panel efficiency like a robot driving a steel fist through a fragile silicon wafer. They have achieved an efficiency of 19.5% with a standard sized panel, 1.67m by 1m in size. The module is 301 watts and Hanwha claims it was produced using standard processes on industrial scale production equipment, which means it should be ready to go into production. [Read more…]

SunPower make some of the best solar panels in existence. Or at least some of the best on this planet. Perhaps Spectrolab regularly shoots better ones into space to mars or somewhere, I don’t know. But if you want to buy something that is meant to go on a roof and not a space probe, then SunPower solar panels are hard to beat.

Now note that I did say some of the best and not some of the cheapest. If you haven’t worked out that the words cheap and best don’t normally go together, then I have a really low quality laptop held together with superglue and wooden rulers that I’d like to sell to you at a really high price. [Read more…]